As is well known, both the drafting and the anticipated ratification of the draft Constitutional Treaty were surrounded by a lively debate. The communicative spectacle created by the “Convention on the Future of Europe” and its ambitious plan to draw up a European constitution served as the major attractors. The debate was conducted, of course, in different settings and at several levels. What interests me here, though, is that the public and the academic debate emphasised different aspects of the overall project.

Which element of democracy is to prevail in the composition of parliament: an accurate reflection of minorities and their ideas, or a strong bond between citizens and their representatives? The answer, it seems, is to be determined to a large extent by the national political culture. The political history of the Netherlands makes strict proportionality the highest principle in this regard. Over the years, various attempts at fundamental electoral reform have been left stranded. It seems that the current system of proportional representation will remain intact in the Netherlands in spite of periodic attempts at change, as it probably best reflects the Dutch culture's longing for maximum inclusiveness.

This paper argues that the third pillar, despite the ECJ's landmark ruling of Pupino (which extended communautaire reasoning to the third pillar terrain) is and remains different from the supranational sphere. In so doing, the paper asks whether a consistent approach to EU law can be derived from the orthodoxy of EC law by focussing on the recent judgments of Advocaten voor der Wereld and Dell'Orto.

This year the Karl Mannheim Centre for Criminology at The London School of Economics hosted the 2007 annual conference of the British Society of Criminology between the 18th and 20th of September. Some 280 papers, two plenary sessions and a number of “author meets critics” sessions gave insight into the diverse fields of criminological research in the UK and abroad. The conference's theme was programmatic: “Crime and Justice in an Age of Global Insecurity”. The notion of insecurity, expressing a globalized experience and an ontological status of the human being in late modernity, termed a historical period of time. It fits to a conjuncture of theorizing the uncanniness of contemporary social life. In this way, the theme of the conference is partly to write the history of the present in terms of crime and justice. Such conferences are both a witness of the social processes surrounding the issues of crime and criminal justice, and an agent of change by providing directives for the future, thereby shaping the way in which criminologists look at the social world.